It is a commonly held position among political commentators in the English-speaking world that Donald Trump’s second term as US president marks the demise of an international order that had held since the end of the second World War, and that was based on a shared European and American commitment to liberal democracy and international law.
His shameful attempt to publicly bully Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office; his subsequent abandonment of Ukraine in its attempt to repulse Russia’s invasion; his endless half-coherent s**t-talk about annexing Canada and Greenland; his public support of far-right political movements in Europe: all these are evidence, it is said, of the passing of an old order, and the arrival of some new and terrible dispensation.
But by the time Trump returned to the White House last January, the liberal international order had been lying cold for well over a year beneath the rubble of Gaza. Trump didn’t kill it; he has merely been dancing – fists shunting back and forth like rhythmic pistons, knees bending and unbending in that familiar syncopation of decrepit machismo – on its grave.
The resumption last week of Israel’s air strikes on Gaza resulted in what has been widely reported as the largest overnight death toll since 2023. More than 400 civilians were killed, 174 of them children. Israel, as one commentator in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it, “committed the largest child massacre in its history”. And now as before, it’s the depth of the harm done to children that is so upsetting to see, and that is so necessary to witness.
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Last week, a British-Australian emergency doctor named Mohammed Mustafa posted to Instagram a video from the Gaza hospital where he was volunteering, in which he attempted to describe what he had seen and experienced, in working through the previous night.
Visibly exhausted and on the verge of tears, he speaks into his phone camera about the conditions under which he and his colleagues have had to perform emergency medical procedures. There are no more painkillers, he says. When they intubate people, they wake up choking, he says, because there is no sedation. Amputations were performed on the legs of seven girls, he says, without anaesthesia. The patients they are seeing are mostly women and children, burned from head to toe, limbs missing. The screams are everywhere, he says, the smell of burnt flesh is still with him.
At some point during that hellish night, Dr Mustafa also filmed a brief clip from the emergency ward itself. Maybe you’ve seen this clip. In it, a small boy is seen from behind, sitting on the end of a hospital bed, his little hand gripping the bed’s metal frame. He is sitting perfectly still, facing a tiled wall. The boy, according to Dr Mustafa, was one of about a dozen young children who arrived at the hospital that night, having lost their entire families in the bombing. He does not cry; he just sits there, staring at the wall.
Behind him, on the same bed, are other small children, variously wounded, alone in their unknowable pain and fear. The boy sat in that position for an hour, his gaze fixed on the wall. It’s a scene as haunting as any we have seen from the long months of this slaughter.
And as so often with this war, there exists a kind of companion piece to this footage, as horrifying in its way: a video made by a group of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers inside another hospital, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital. In this video, we see a young Israeli soldier using a massage machine on the back an older soldier, perhaps his unit commander. They are both laughing. “I’m here at the Turkish Hospital in Gaza,” says the older man, “and the soldiers came to spoil me with a massage. What a pleasure.”
The Geneva Convention explicitly forbids cutting off or destroying water supplies in cases where it will cause disproportionate suffering to civilians. Did the BBC reporter really not know this?
This machine is a piece of medical equipment for the treatment of cancer patients, because the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital is the only medical facility in Gaza specifically equipped to treat cancer patients. Or rather, it was. I need hardly tell you, because it is so grimly predictable, that this performance of grotesque mockery took place in a hospital that no longer exists, because shortly after filming it these soldiers blew it up.
[ Israeli soldiers flee Netherlands following accusations of Gaza war crimesOpens in new window ]
The evidence of such war crimes continues to proliferate, but much of the media and the political establishment in the West refuses to see what is directly under its nose, or to say what it is seeing. Earlier this month, for instance, when Israel’s energy minister announced his intention, a week after blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, to cut off all water supplies to the area, a BBC News correspondent said the following: “It’s all designed to ratchet up pressure on Hamas. But it will, of course, add to those accusations that Israel has been committing war crimes.”
Because it is so common, it can be hard to see the absurdity of this sort of locution, with its blatant obfuscation of clear legal and moral fact. The announcement of such an intention would add to accusations that Israel has been committing war crimes for the precise reason that it is a war crime. The Geneva Convention, to which Israel is (along with its European and American allies) a signatory, explicitly forbids cutting off or destroying water supplies in cases where it will cause disproportionate suffering to civilians. Did the BBC reporter really not know this?
In fact, we all know it. We all know, in a broader sense, what is going on. Blocking humanitarian aid for some two million trapped Palestinians; cutting off the water and power supplies they need to live; blowing up hospitals; killing and maiming and orphaning countless children. Those of us who are willing to see what is under our noses know very well that what is happening now in Gaza is an ongoing project of ethnic cleansing.
This is the deliberate infliction on the population of Gaza, by the Israeli government – and with the support and assistance of its allies and enablers in the West – of conditions that are calculated to destroy the possibilities for life.
“This is only the beginning,” as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it, in a televised address on the renewal of air strikes. We know how he wants it to end.
